letters to mum II – family // like a grate

by m lewis redford

Mum was diagnosed with cancer in the early summer of 1998, she died the following March 1999; I couldn’t get up to London to see her regularly so I started a correspondence; sixteen years later I realise that our correspondence didn’t just stop with her death, the same as our life together didn’t: our life together was always the response between the words and events …

290798

Dear Mum,

it was good to read from you
in this new write of relationship
although the tiredness in your word
was obvious when it came:

so you might expect a remission
for weeks or years or not, which
certainly sharpens a life, and with no
dependents to consider anymore

preparing ready for the time
more-clear-now to come, the better
to put your life into its order,
is it God calling you now?

I know you have your congregation
around you (even if it is too much at times)
how families ebb and go in peoples’ lives
only sometimes built around the tree

we four were close for a while forming the
parts of each others’ lives; it took a long time to
emerge, even after university, even after
Nan died, even as my own family grew,

I was still with us in Genesta Road; and yet
there you are, all through the chemo, I see
you adjust your life talking of ‘excess
baggage’ – I was happy to take possession

of the photographs: of you working at the
office seeing those goods in and out, those
huge ships like family, with their chapter
and verse, those endless invoices in triplicate

smell of typewriter ribbon, the bad air-conditioning
the silly young office workers testing up their futures
your giggly exchanges with them, all part of that endless work
up and down the River through endless years like a grate

"...writing makes my heart pound, my hands flutter. It still makes me hungry and desirous and fearful. Because I need the honest beautiful grotesquerie of the world, because I want to stay sensitive. I want to wallow and bounce…”